It has become common place for people to use computing devices to communicate with each other. From simple text and graphics to interactive multimedia environments including voice, animation and video, computing devices have gone beyond the traditional mobile phone to support a wide variety of modes of communication. There is a correspondingly wide variety of communication networks that connect such computing devices, each with characteristic advantages and disadvantages, and, in particular, each requiring a characteristic expenditure of power. A core concern of device and network designers, particularly for portable computing devices with limited power supplies, is to provide a rich communication feature set while operating within a power budget.
The proliferation of communication networks and network types has resulted in further challenges and opportunities. In particular, network users typically desire to utilize the lowest cost network that can provide a given communication feature set. For example, the increasing availability of relatively low cost wireless internet service has sparked a demand for mobile Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service. However, implementation of a given communication feature set for a network not explicitly designed for that feature set typically involves engineering trade-offs, particularly with respect to device power expenditure.
The mobile VoIP service example illustrates the problem. Traditional mobile phones operate at a variety of power expenditure levels to minimize overall usage, for example, at a relatively low level when waiting for a call and at higher levels during a call. Handset network interface power levels are tuned to the relatively low bandwidth required for telephone quality voice. In contrast, computing devices supporting mobile VoIP service typically utilize a standard wireless internet connection, for example, in accordance with one of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE®)802.11 series of standards. Such standards are tuned for internet usage patterns as opposed to telephone call usage patterns, so that, for example, they may lack a suitable low power mode in which to wait for an incoming call thus quickly spending the device's power budget.
Rapid expenditure of a device's power budget effectively reduces service quality, particularly for mobile devices with limited power supplies. Unfortunately, current methods of ameliorating this problem can introduce further problems. For the mobile VoIP service example, a simple power saving mechanism between calls is to activate the device's network interface only periodically to check for an incoming call. However, this mechanism introduces a call response delay which also reduces service quality, albeit in a different way. Systems and methods are desirable that adapt to, for example, low cost networks in ways that minimize reduction in service quality.